KIDcam is an on-going collaborative research project between QMC Instruments Ltd. and its academic partners at Cardiff University. It aims to apply to a wide range of terrestrial applications the high sensitivity of Kinetic Inductance Detector technology that was originally developed for astronomy. The instrument is liquid cryogen-free, it runs automatically, and it can be controlled remotely. The instrument has recently been upgraded to observe at 345 GHz, and many aspects of its performance have been improved. We now achieve photon noise limited sensitivity. The project aims to achieve video rate multi-spectral imaging with background limited sensitivity as a contribution to ensuring that THz techniques can be used in reasonable deployable formats in the civil theatre.

Sensitivity of microbolometer Terahertz (THz) focal plane array (FPA) is improved by one order of magnitude at 0.5- 0.6 THz, comparing with the previous THz-FPA. This is achieved by modifying an optical cavity structure in a pixel, such that the optical cavity length is extended by a factor of 4-5 than that of the previous structure. Minimum detectable powers (MDPs) per pixel are measured at 4.3, 2.5, 0.6 and 0.5 THz for the THz-FPAs (640x480, 320x240) with the modified structure and those (320x240) with the previous structure.

A terahertz detector composed of a metamaterial absorber and micro-bolometer sensor integrated in a standard CMOS process is presented. The prototype demonstrates an innovative, uncooled, low cost, compact terahertz detector that is readily scaleable to high resolution focal plane array formats. The detector imaging capability is demonstrated in a transmission mode experiment.

Author(s): Ivonne Escorcia Carranza - University of Glasgow James Grant - University of Glasgow David R.S. Cumming - University of Glasgow Download Paper

Properties of antenna-coupled microbolometers optimized for room temperature 300 GHz and 600 GHz resonant frequency detection is reported. Dipole antenna placed on free-standing SiN membrane is used to couple THz radiation power to the titanium-based thermo-resistor. We demonstrate that antenna-coupled micro-bolometers can be well suited for beam profile imaging of the THz pulses emitted by the photoconductive antenna switch.